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Social document collaboration now easier than ever

Since writing this post, Apache OpenOffice 4.0 has been released! The follow-up to both Apache OpenOffice 3.4 and IBM Lotus Symphony, this latest release continues the transformation of desktop productivity into social document collaboration. You can read more from the Press Release, and download it from the Apache Project site.

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Word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations...our collective work day is still dominated by what we write and share through these documents. Unfortunately, we all know the result. We spend a lot of time finding, collecting and consolidating input from multiple contributors. We struggle with multiple versions of the same document. Those multiple and often duplicate versions are posted to lots of places -- our hard drive, our Content Management System, our internal social networks and directories... -- that are hard to find. And a password protected document is hardly secure enough for many situations, especially for documents that need to be shared. And it's all rather expensive if you happen to use Microsoft Office, as many of you do.

But there's a new way of thinking about these critical business documents. Social document collaboration allows organizations to integrate key office document activities, including authoring, collaboration and sharing. More importantly, those actions can be taken regardless of where you are when done across desktop, cloud and mobile environments. And they should support open standards to make sharing and collaboration even easier. And they should integrate with secure content management systems so you can ensure policies are maintained.

IBM has offered social document collaboration for some time. IBM Docs for SmartCloud is perfect for mobile and social light-weight Web co-editing tools. And Apache OpenOffice makes for an excellent alternative to expensive packaged applications for full-featured desktop office productivity editing, ever since IBM donated IBM Lotus Symphony code to the Apache community back in 2011.

IBM Docs is now available for on premises deployment with IBM Connections 4.5. It is also available with IBM Notes 9 Social Edition and IBM WebSphere Portal as an add-on to your existing IBM Connections files and profiles entitlements.

Performance improvements make for faster load times, faster page up and page down in spreadsheets, and faster conversion to PDF

IBM Docs files now retain their original extension, such as .doc or .xls, after being edited in IBM Docs. Before you had to go through several clicks to download files in Microsoft Office format, which is no longer the case.

You can set Microsoft Office file format as your default format for new files created in IBM Docs.

IBM Docs now allows you to create files from OOXML templates.

Serviceability enhancements means IBM Docs now provides more details in application level and Server level alerts, while also providing more accurate error codes for user scenarios when an error occurs.

IBM social document solutions help create a more effective workforce by helping teams focus on a single document in the cloud, with sophisticated, business-ready documents authored with your choice of editors – desktop, web or mobile. Publish to activity streams. Comment and discuss documents more widely. Edit, review, comment and approve on the go.

Doesn't that sound like a better way to collaborate on business-critical documents and information? Try it for yourself and see why. You can try IBM Docs at no cost for 60 days as part of an IBM SmartCloud Engage Advanced trial. And of course, join the over 50 million people who have already downloaded Apache OpenOffice 3.4 by downloading the now available OpenOffice 4.0.

Comments (2)

"It is also available with IBM Notes 9 Social Edition and IBM
WebSphere Portal as an add-on to your existing IBM Connections
files and profiles entitlements."
Does this mean that Google Docs is free within the Notes
Entitlement and can be installed and used as Profiles and Files?

@Rost, Ralph I think you mean IBM Docs, because Google Docs is a
completely separate offering from another company. IBM Docs can
work with Connections, or work with Notes or WebSphere Portal
through their Entitlement to Connections FIles. Regardless of how
you use IBM Docs, it requires an additional license fee, please see
the Announcement Letter for specific pricing. I hope that answers
your question.